When the Order of Knights Templar was ruthlessly dissolved by King Philip the Fair of France in 1307, it possessed immense wealth and political power. Yet none of the treasure amassed by the Templars has ever been found. This lost treasure is rumored to have contained artifacts of spiritual significance that were retrieved by the order during the Crusades, including the genealogies of David and Jesus, as well as documents that trace these bloodlines into the royal bloodlines of Merovingian France—documents that were perceived by those in power in medieval Europe as a threat to the established order of church and state.
But what connects this treasure to the Oak Island Money Pit—so-called because of both the priceless treasure it may houle and the extraordinary sums of money spent in futile attempts to excavate it—that has baffled treasure hunters for over two hundred years? Using new-found historical evidence that places a Scottish presence in the New World a century before Columbus, Steven Sora presents a fascinating and convincing scenario that has the Sinclair clan of Scotland transporting the wealth of the Templars—entrusted to them as the Masonic heirs of the order—to a remote island off the shores of present-day Nova Scotia. The mysterious money pit there is commonly believed to have been built before 1497 and has guarded its secret tenaciously despite two centuries of determined efforts to unearth it. All of these efforts (one even financed by American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt) have failed, thanks to an elaborate system of booby traps, false beaches, hidden drains, and other hazards of remarkable ingenuity and technological complexity created by its builders. Even in recent years, despite the increasingly sophisticated tools at our disposal, the secret of the Oak Island Money Pit has remained beyond our reach.
At least until now.
Steven Sora has been researching unusual historical enigmas since 1982. He lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar is his first book.